[mythtv-users] LiveTV conflicts with scheduled recording - despite unused tuners on the same box!

[Michael T. Dean]

On 07/02/2009 02:57 PM, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Live TV makes sense with two constraints: A) An unscheduled,
> unexpected event occurs, with coverage on multiple channels and no
> particular reason to choose between any one of them, and B) only one
> tuner. That was the case for the 2002 and 2004 US elections, but I
> can't think of any other times that I used Live TV with a TiVo (which,
> back then, was only a single-tuner device except for DirecTV
> subscribers). It certainly doesn't make sense for me today, with four
> tuners.
>
> Yes, if space aliens attack Chicago tomorrow, I'd use Live TV to flip
> between channels, but only because setting up recording rules to
> record each news channel using preexisting scheduling data (news
> program at 10am, talk show at 10:30, etc.) would be unwieldy (but
> still possible, if desired). Now, if the aliens' attack was known
> about in advance, I could be sure that every channel would have its
> version of special coverage of the events, so this problem wouldn't
> exist.
>
>   

I wouldn't use LiveTV for that.  If space aliens attack Chicago, I 
would--as soon as I realized it--set up several custom recording rules.  
The first recording rule would be one that picks up /all/ programs that 
mention the space aliens (with whatever "newsworthy" moniker they'd been 
given).  True, that rule would be useless today, but would ensure I see 
all the coverage for tomorrow and following days.  The next rules I 
would create would just record all the shows on my choice of news 
channels (or, for that event, I'm sure the local networks would have all 
their news teams interrupting normal programming, too) and I'd assign a 
recording group to those rules that makes it easy to find all the 
recordings.  Or, if I decide, "I just want to record the next 24 hours 
of Fox News and CNN and Bloomberg TV and don't want to mess with the 
program names of the regularly-scheduled shows," I'd just make a few 
manual recording rules with good titles--like, "Alien Invasion coverage 
on CNN, day 1".

I'd then watch the recordings--perhaps skipping from recording to 
recording with channel up/channel down (which change channels in LiveTV 
but switch recordings in recording playback).

Why do it this way?  Well, if I'm using LiveTV and I'm watching coverage 
on CNN, but it starts to get boring and I switch over to Fox and see 
something /really/ interesting, I'm missing all the coverage on CNN 
during the period I'm on Fox.  Also, if I switch back to CNN and catch 
the last few seconds their showing some really interesting live footage, 
I can't rewind it to catch the beginning.  So, the "professional" LiveTV 
viewer/channel-surfer may reason, "Well, I'll just go over to Fox and 
see if they're showing it, too," and I switch back to Fox after 1min 
45sec and find out that Fox isn't showing the live footage, so I figure, 
"Well, catching the end is better than nothing, so I'll just rewind and 
re-watch the part that I did see."  Then, while rewinding, it completely 
skips over the part of my LiveTV history where I was on Fox for 
1:45--because any LiveTV recordings shorter than 2 minutes are expired 
"immediately."

Basically, if you want to watch some portion of shows on more than one 
channel, schedule recordings for all those channels because the networks 
have a really annoying habit of running the interesting content at the 
same time (not to mention running commercials at the same time).

> Actually, thinking of Live TV this way shifts the onus. How about
> this? "Using Live TV means you haven't recorded enough."

Agreed.

Mike